Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems Engineering

Chapter 5COMPLEX SYSTEMS ENGINEERING AND THE CHALLENGE OF EMERGENCE

Andreas Tolk¹, Saikou Diallo², and Saurabh Mittal³

¹The MITRE Corporation, Hampton, VA, USA

²Virginia Modeling, Analysis & Simulation Center, Old Dominion University, Suffolk, VA, USA

³The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA

SUMMARY

Systems engineering methods do not only help us to engineer artificial systems, but they also provide means that help to understand natural systems. Complexity and emergence add challenges that require new methods to cope with them, leading to complex systems engineering, which applies increasingly simulation solution to provide insights into the dynamic behavior of complex systems, allowing to detect and understand some classes of emergent behavior. This chapter introduces simple, complicated, and complex system definitions and shows how these system classes are related to simple, weak, strong, and spooky emergence, and which systems engineering methods can be applied to support the detection, understanding, and management of such emergence.

INTRODUCTION

After we dealt with the philosophical and general scientific view on complexity and emergence in the leading chapters of this book, we turn our attention to emergence in the state of the art of system's engineering, more specifically in the context of complex systems engineering. We will address the questions of how complex systems are different from complicated systems, what new methods can be used to support complex systems ...